I have a 50 minute drive to my property. And NPR informs and entertains. Except during the 2 week fund raising campaign. Then I have to improvise and, since I have a basic truck which does not have a connection for mp3, I burn podcasts on CD’s and listen, intently, since you cannot rewind a missed phrase but must go b ack to the beginning of the track.
A review by Paul Wheaton on the self sufficiency and sustainability practices of the Japanese during the Edo period (book “Just Enough” by Azby Brown) kept me going for several days. But I needed more. In the past I listened to and enjoyed Krista Tippett broadcast interviews. I downloaded a few and today I heard her interview with Joanna Macy, a Buddhist scholar and translater of Rainer Maria Rilke. Exquisite. They discuss two different ways to approach environmental degradation – the scientific informed approach armed with research, statistics and photographs, or from our being as part of this world. I am working my way through the former but a beckoning portal has been illumined for me.
Here is the poem from which this post’s header is taken:
Wild Love
Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days?
Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness
Give me your hand.
– the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke translated by the philosopher of ecology Joanna Macy